search the site

Hybrid IT adoption on the rise

Dimension Data has published a new report that explores the current state of hybrid IT deployments, as well as the key requirements and business drivers that determine workload-placement decisions.
The research of 1 500 IT decision makers from multiple vertical industries across the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South Africa, reveals that hybrid IT is becoming a standard enterprise model, but there’s no single playbook to get there. Looking at the top motivators to move to hybrid IT by country, Hong Kong, UK and US companies highlighted end user demand most often, while respondents in France, Singapore and South Africa most often noted cost. Malaysian firms listed hiring challenges, and German firms men-tioned limited data centre capacity as the most common motivating factors.
The Success Factors for Managing Hybrid IT report points to the fact that management of the hybrid IT environment (41% of respondents) is one of the top three challenges in deployment.

Dimension Data Group CEO, Jason Goodall says: “With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, a new approach to management is called for. IT managers are under tremendous pressure to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments in an effective manner. Automation is important because it helps reduce the operating costs, as well as the pain caused by the growing complexity of business processes and management tasks. It is simply no longer appropriate or cost-effective for these tasks to be done manually.”
Data migration was another common deployment challenge, with 44% of the respondents saying they found it challenging to deter¬mine which option is the best for a partic¬ular workload and to migrate workloads to new locations
While 38% of enterprises surveyed claimed that they use automation to accelerate application migration, 48% said that migration at their company is manual and labour-intensive or that they use in-house resources. Today’s application and data migration remains complex and expensive for most organisations.

According to Stephen Green, Solutions CTO at Dimension Data Middle East & Africa, one of the key insights that came out of the report is that South Africa’s public cloud adoption is lower than other regions surveyed and possible reasons for this are challenges around networking, cost and latency, security concerns and the challenges related to data migration to international data centres.

“As a result of this we are seeing a rise in private cloud adoption, and that is why we have extended our managed services capability to provide for management, orchestration and automation of workloads across on premise and public environments through a single user interface. The requirement for management and orchestration, as highlighted in the report, becomes a key enabler for organisations to realise the value proposition of Hybrid IT, and our investments in this area are what sets Dimension Data’s global platform apart for local clients.”

According to Kelly Morgan, Research Vice President, Services at 451 Research, managed services have become a key component of service delivery across a range of infrastructure and application products. “Service providers that can offer a comprehensive portfolio of managed services across the broadest set of infrastructure options are well positioned to meet the full set of enterprise cloud requirements,” says Morgan.

• Enterprises are spending a significant portion of their IT budgets with third-party service providers on managed and profes¬sional services for various reasons – to lower cost, to free IT staff to focus on other projects, to improve security, and to provide specialised technical expertise. The research reveals that 41% of organisations work with multiple vendors and manage them themselves, and another 37% work with a single vendor that can offer a broad range of products and services which it builds and manages.